Re: Are you a "Mental Gymnast"?

["Gary S. Callison" <huey -at- interaccess -dot- com>]

On Tue, 21 Jan 2003, maggiros -at- yahoo -dot- com (Maggie Pierce Secara) revived the
Monty Hall question thusly:

> Pretend you are on a game show where you need to
> choose between three doors to win a prize...
> *********
> Kind of an interesting twist on the same old thing,
> isn't it. 
> They're also hiring at least one writer, who isn't
> asked to play this game, although it might be cool to
> do it anyway.  Presumably there's no "right" answer. 

There is a right answer. It's in the rec.puzzles FAQ 
(<http://mneylon.masemware.com/puzzles/faq.txt> and scroll down to
question 2.4) and comes back like a bad penny every once-a-year or so in
the usenet newsgroup alt.fan.cecil-adams. 

> Thoughts?

As far as a resume-collecting stunt goes, I'd probably roundfile anyone
who couldn't use Google too, although there's certainly easier ways. You
could set up a googlewhack, or hide some bit of data somewhere on your own
webpage, and then ask a question about that specific piece of data, just
to see who is doing their homework before mailing the envelope. 

It's sometimes possible to give that impression in the absence of a
silly question, though. I once found the name of a company's HR director
in the metadata of a document on their webpage, addressed my cover 
letter directly to her, and then introduced myself to her at a resume
fair. In a room full of people with cover letters that said "Dear Sir" or
"ATTN: HR department", I had one that said "ATTN: Mary so-and-so". Makes
it jump out of the pile a little. 

-- 
Huey



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